LA LA LAND▶

La La Land was involved in an extremely embarrassing awards mix-up. Twice.

The world cringed as La La Land was mistakenly read out as the Best Film at the Oscars in January. (A post-mortem on the affair noted that one of the two officials giving out the magic envelopes had been taking a selfie with Emma Stone two minutes before.) A couple of days earlier, the Huffington Post had published an article entitled ‘What Would Happen If a Presenter Announced the Wrong Winner at the Oscars?’ Brian Cullinan, the man who was to hand over the wrong envelope on the night, was quoted as saying, ‘It’s so unlikely.’

It wasn’t the only mistake made that night: in the course of paying tribute to Australian costume designer Janet Patterson in the ‘In Memoriam’ section, the Academy managed to put up a photo of the wrong person, producer Jan Chapman. She pointed out, ‘I am alive and well and an active producer.’

Remarkably, La La Land was involved in another prizes mix-up. At Germany’s prestigious Goldene Kamera awards, excitement that La La Land had triumphed again turned to embarrassment when the award was collected not by Ryan Gosling – as the organisers had expected – but by a Ryan Gosling impersonator, who turned out to be a cook from Munich called Ludwig. Two comedians had tricked the organisers into inviting the fake Gosling, and because the hosts were so excited to have such a massive celebrity they agreed not to host him on the red carpet and to leave him completely alone before the ceremony. It was only when he appeared onstage that everyone realised they’d been tricked.

This sort of thing happens quite a lot. The very night of the Academy Awards, the British Kebab Awards, ‘the kebab equivalent of the Oscars’, had its own La La Land moment. Staff from Koz, in Beckenham, took to the stage to collect their award for Customer Satisfaction, only to be told that the actual winner was Kosk, in Edmonton. And then, on UK general election night, the wrong candidate was named as the winner in Mansfield, until people pointed out to the returning officer that she’d got her numbers wrong.

The La La Land team may not have taken a golden statuette home this year, but they did get a golden crayon. It came inside the goody-bags given to all nominees, along with treats that included a luxury T-shirt, an underarm patch to prevent sweating, and a 10-month supply of apples (as well as several holidays).

LANGUAGES▶

Instead of their ABCs, Ethiopian children are now learning their LAGs.

The government of Ethiopia has changed the alphabet of the country’s most commonly spoken language, Oromo. It used to go A, B, C, D, E, F… just like other Latin alphabets, but it now goes: L A G I M Aa^* S. The government says that the new alphabet suits the language better, and so will help children to learn. But opponents say that it’s a way of complicating the language so it eventually disappears, in favour of Amharic, which has four million fewer speakers but is the national tongue. It’s been a long fight for the 25 million Oromo speakers in Ethiopia. It was illegal to write the language down in any alphabet until 1991.

Another language in danger this year is Icelandic: it’s being killed by computers. According to the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance (META), Icelandic was late to the language-technology party, and so is one of the least well-supported big languages. What this means in practice is that while you can speak to your smart fridge in English, French and probably Oromo, it won’t understand you if you speak Icelandic.

And now computers are beginning to make their own languages. Facebook trained bots to trade with one another, and found that the programs started to communicate in a ‘language’ that humans couldn’t understand. Here’s an example:

Bob: i can i i everything else …

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else …

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i i can i i i everything else …

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

They turned the program off soon after this discovery.

Meanwhile, President Erdoğan of Turkey has launched a crackdown on Western-derived words. All sports grounds with the word ‘arena’ in their name, for instance, were ordered to replace it with ‘stadyumu’. In a speech in May, he said that borrowed words were not ‘sik’, a Turkish word meaning ‘stylish’ which he may not have realised derives from the French word ‘chic’.

France’s slogan for its 2024 Olympic bid is in English, not French, even though French is one of the two official Olympic languages. French-language supporters campaigned for the phrase ‘Made for Sharing’ to be replaced with a French one, while the Académie Française pointed out it’s been used in adverts for pizzas and sweets, which isn’t in the spirit of the Olympics.

LASERS▶

Scientists have made a laser that can send a beam two million miles, one that can shine a billion times brighter than the sun, and one that can delouse a salmon.

The sharpest laser, which can transmit a beam two million miles without it going out of phase (i.e. before the light starts to look a bit fuzzy), was made by American and German researchers, and will be used to make clocks more accurate, and to test Einstein’s theory of relativity. The brightest, made by scientists at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, will help us to make better X-rays and smaller computer chips.

Either laser would be extreme overkill for a new smart underwater drone that’s patrolling the fjords of Norway, checking salmon for lice and then, if it finds any, killing the lice with a laser blast. The laser doesn’t injure the salmon because the salmon’s scales reflect the light like a disco ball.

NASA announced that the Mars Curiosity Rover has had a successful year, driving around autonomously and firing lasers at rocks. The rover’s software lets it select which rocks to blast, and then it vaporises them with a laser. This allows it to sniff out what chemicals the rocks are made of, revealing information about Mars’s surface to scientists on earth.

LAWSUITS, NON-TRUMP▶

Lawsuits this year included the following:

is the scariest book I’ve read.’

▶ The Terracotta Army vs their substitutes. China’s Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor announced it was preparing lawsuits against anyone who infringed copyright on its 2,000-year-old statues, after a Chinese theme park and a Belgian train station put on unofficial displays of replicas.

▶ The People vs The Spying Vibrator. A Canadian vibrator firm agreed to pay up to £2.4 million in compensation after selling customers a ‘smart vibrator’ which tracked people’s use without their knowledge. The We-Vibe 4 Plus can be activated remotely and collected data about ‘temperature and vibration intensity’.

▶ The Yellow Light Crusader vs Oregon State Board of Engineers. Mats Järlström, an American who wanted to make traffic lights stay yellow for longer to improve traffic efficiency, filed a lawsuit against the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying after he was hit with a fine of $500 when he proposed his plans to the city council. He was fined for taking part in the ‘practice of engineering’ without a licence.

The board takes such claims by individuals very seriously. Last year it investigated a man standing to become Republican candidate for governor, whose political ads claimed: ‘I’m an engineer and a problem solver.’ The board concluded that he wasn’t, as he was not registered in Oregon as a professional engineer.

LAWSUITS, TRUMP’S 134▶

Donald Trump was sued 134 times in his first 100 days.^*

Fortunately, he’s well used to lawsuits; in his life, he’s been involved in more than 3,500 of them. This is probably why he has five lawyers, including his chief personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who this year hired a lawyer of his own to represent him during the investigation into the US government’s links to Russia. Vice President Mike Pence, and the head of communications during the Republican presidential campaign, Michael Caputo, have also hired their own personal lawyers since becoming involved in the administration.

In 2013, Michael Cohen filed a lawsuit on Trump’s behalf against American TV host Bill Maher. In response to Trump’s demands that Obama publish his birth certificate, Maher had joked on The Tonight Show that he’d donate $5 million to charity if Trump could publish his birth certificate as evidence that he wasn’t part orangutan. Trump took the challenge literally, revealed his birth certificate, which did indeed prove he wasn’t fathered by an ape, and promptly sued Maher when he didn’t pay up. The lawsuit was eventually withdrawn, but Cohen made it clear that they intended to re-file it at a later date.

Even Trump’s golf clubs didn’t escape lawsuits. One woman tried to sue Trump’s Aberdeenshire course this year after she was photographed urinating on it. She had been relieving herself while on a walk near the course when she was spotted by golf-club employees, who took pictures on their phones and reported her to the police. It turned out she was acting perfectly legally, and she sued for damages over the distress caused by being photographed. She didn’t win the case, although the club staff were heavily reprimanded by the court.

Trump’s appetite for lawsuits probably explains why he bought up the URL iambeingsuedbythedonald.com before anyone else could. Other websites he has owned include donaldtrumpsucks.com, trumpscam.com and ihatetrumpvodka.com.

LEAKS, INFORMATION▶

The world learned the CIA has hacking programmes called Panda Poke, Panda Flight and Panda Sneeze.

In March, WikiLeaks published 8,761 documents that exposed the CIA’s fondness for fun names. Other programme names included CrunchyLimeSkies, ElderPiggy, BuzFuz, Magical Mutt, Secret Squirrel, DRBOOM and McNugget.

The leak also exposed multiple CIA hacking and surveillance techniques. For instance, TVs and phones can be set to ‘fake off’ mode, so that they can still be used for eavesdropping when users believe they’re switched off. It was also revealed that the CIA understands that its employees might occasionally need some down time. Its advice to hackers when travelling with Lufthansa was: ‘Booze is free, so enjoy (within reason)!’

Personal information about 60 per cent of the US population was accidentally leaked in June by a conservative data firm working for the Republican Party. The company, Deep Root Analytics, stored details of people’s names, addresses, phone numbers, ethnicity and opinions on issues like gun ownership and stem-cell research, on a publicly accessible Amazon server. Anyone with the URL could access information on the 198 million people whose details were held there. It represented the largest leak of people’s personal information in American history, and constituted enough data to fill 36,000 CDs.

An Apple briefing called ‘Stopping Leakers – Keeping Confidential at Apple’ was leaked. The hour-long recording of an internal briefing about how to keep information out of the hands of leakers, competitors and the press was leaked to and covered widely by the press.

LEAKS, WATER▶

A hotel called the Niagra had to close down because it was full of water.

In February, a budget hotel in Blackpool formerly known as the Vidella underwent an exciting name change. Proprietor Neil Marshall changed its name to the ‘Viagra’. He also added a big sign on the front saying: ‘We will keep you up all night!’^*

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the council received complaints from the public and neighbouring businesses, who said that passing children were asking what the sign meant. The council promptly wrote to Mr Marshall, asking him to change the name to ‘something less provocative and more in keeping with the nature of your business i.e. a hotel’. Not only that, but Pfizer – the firm which makes Viagra pills – said that ‘Pfizer does not support nor condone the use of the Viagra trademark in this manner’, adding that they would be ‘taking appropriate action’.

Undaunted, Marshall crossed out the V and replaced it with an N, making the hotel the Niagra, and amended the sign to say: ‘We will keep you wet all night!’^* As he told the Sun, ‘In this world there are some people who drink tea and coffee all day and don’t have a sense of humour. There are others who drink lager and have a laugh – it’s about opinions and people love it.’

This new strategy backfired three months later, when a major pipe leak forced the newly christened Niagra to close for repairs.

LEFTIES▶

For an award-winning beard, see Corbyn, Jeremy; for a laughter-loving socialist see Ecuador; for an anti-capitalist hologram, see French Presidential Election; and for a left-wing leader who’s running low on toilet paper, see Venezuela.

LEGO▶

In China, you can buy ISIS-themed knock-off LEGO.

The ‘Military Figures Falcon Commandos Terrorist Assassination Charge Captain Medical Staff box’ includes ISIS flags and decapitated heads (although, of course, many LEGO sets contain heads that are easy to remove). This is not real LEGO, though, and so isn’t likely to be studied by Cambridge University’s new ‘LEGO professor’. This year, Paul Ramchandani, an expert in child mental health, was appointed the university’s ‘LEGO Professor of Play’. He will examine how children are encouraged to play at home and school.^†

Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary had LEGO-related problems this year. Steven Mnuchin had to write to the Office of Government Ethics after suggestions that he had violated ethical rules by publicly plugging The LEGO Batman Movie, which his company had financed. When asked a question about his movie recommendations, he answered, ‘I’m not allowed to promote anything that I’m involved in … but you should send all your kids to LEGO Batman.’ It was, he said, an accident.

LICENCE PLATES▶

Canada refused to renew a man’s licence plate because his surname was too offensive.

Canadian Lorne Grabher’s family have owned a personalised ‘GRABHER’ licence plate for 27 years. But when a member of the public saw it without realising it was a surname and made a complaint, Nova Scotia authorities revoked permission for the plate to be used. They argued that although Mr Lorne Grabher’s surname is an old German one, the general public wouldn’t know this and that the word ‘GRABHER’ could be misinterpreted as a ‘socially unacceptable slogan’.

Mr Grabher didn’t give up, saying, ‘Where does the Province of Nova Scotia and this government have a person with that kind of power to discriminate against my name?’ His lawyers stated that Grabher and his family are ‘deeply offended and humiliated’ by the authorities’ decision, that it qualifies as an ‘ongoing insult to their heritage’, and said it was ‘censoring of expression’ for good measure. In early 2018, the case will arrive at Nova Scotia’s Supreme Court. To raise money, Mr Grabher’s legal team are selling ‘GRABHER’ bumper stickers.

Canada is not the only country to have experienced problematic number plates. In Wales this year, licence plate ‘JH11 HAD’ was withdrawn at the behest of the DVLA for looking a bit too much like ‘Jihad’. In Sweden, a man who last year failed to get ‘3JOH22A’ registered (it looks like ASSHOLE in a mirror) tried again, this time attempting to register a plate reading ‘8UTT5EX’. He failed for a second time, and so reversed it to ‘X32TTU8’, before failing for a third time. As a member of staff from the Swedish Transport Agency said, ‘We get a lot of requests and some of them are very subtle …This one was quite easy to reject.’

Last year, a driver in China spent £113,000 on a personalised number plate which read ‘88888’ (eight is a very lucky number in China), only to report later that it had made life a nightmare for him, as police kept pulling him over to check the plate wasn’t a fake. He said, ‘I ended up being stopped for longer periods than I was actually driving.’

LITERATURE▶

KFC released a romance novel called Tender Wings of Desire.

The novel, supposedly written by Colonel Sanders, and starring him as the main character, was part of a promotion for Mother’s Day, which the company claims is their best sales day of the year. It is the first book by the Colonel since his 1974 autobiography, Life as I Have Known It Has Been ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’.^*

Tender Wings of Desire met with a mixed response on Amazon. While many enjoyed the 96-page love story, some readers were frustrated by the lack of KFC references. ‘There were no chicken wings,’ wrote one reader in their one-star review. ‘The only thing that vaguely links the story to the restaurant is frequent and copious references to salt,’ wrote another. Many complained there weren’t enough steamy scenes in the book.

Elsewhere, erotic author Chuck Tingle, whose book titles include Pounded by the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union, Fake News, Real Boners, Pounded in the Butt by Covfefe and Slammed by My Handsome Fidget Spinner, has released a colouring book.

Tory politician Gavin Barwell, who wrote a book called How to Win a Marginal Seat, lost his marginal seat in the 2017 general election.

LOST AND FOUND▶

Objects lost and found this year included:

Lost: A controversial monk. Phra Dhammachayo is a Thai monk, wanted on charges of massive embezzlement. But when the Thai government finally got access to his huge religious complex in Bangkok, in a massive police raid involving 3,600 officers, it found only an empty bed stuffed with pillows. One local website called it ‘a trick straight out of Scooby Doo’.

Found: Napoleon’s horse’s hoof. The hoof of Marengo, the horse Napoleon rode at Waterloo, was found in a plastic bag in a kitchen in Somerset. The two front hooves of the horse had been removed after its death and turned into silver snuff mills.

Found: A Nazi bomb. It was found under a petrol station in Greece. Seventy-two thousand people had to be evacuated – the largest peacetime evacuation in Greek history. The bomb had been there since at least 1944.

Lost Then Found: A beach in Ireland. The 300-metre beach, which had been washed away by freakish waves 33 years earlier, reappeared after 10 days of high tides in May as sand washed in to cover the rocks. When the beach went missing, local cafes and hotels shut down – hopefully they can now open up again.

Lost Then Found: Two teenage boys. They got lost in the Paris catacombs, a 200-mile maze of tunnels and bones under the city, after getting separated from their tour group. They wandered about for three days among six million skeletons until they were found by search dogs.

Found, Lost, Then Found Again: The Millennium Time Capsule. Builders working on the O2 arena in London accidentally dug up the time capsule buried there by the presenters of Blue Peter in 1998, which was meant to be left until 2050. Unfortunately the workers crushed it and threw it in a skip without realising what it was. It was eventually retrieved, meaning that the nation still has a vital record of life in 1998, including a Tamagotchi, a Spice Girls CD, some rollerblades, some felt from the Millennium Dome roof and a picture of Tony Blair in a high-vis vest.

The Welsh coastguard called off the search for a man lost at sea when it turned out he was in the pub. A helicopter and lifeboat both looked for him, only for a Holyhead Coastguard spokeswoman to announce the man had ‘rescued himself’, and had then retired to the appropriately named local pub, the Ship Aground.

LOTTERIES▶

Daylight saving time helped Romanians win the lottery.

A group of gamblers took advantage of the clocks going forward by one hour in Romania, but not in Greece, and bet on the Greek lottery after the results had been announced online, but before they were logged in Romanian computers. The scam was only uncovered when the bookmakers ran out of money, and the gamblers called the police. Once the police were involved, the bookies realised their mistake and cancelled all the bets. Generously, given the fact that they were thousands of pounds out of pocket, they agreed to refund all the stakes.

In other gambling news: a woman in New York is suing a casino because when a slot machine displayed a win of nearly $43 million, staff refused to pay out and claimed it was faulty. Had she won, it would have been the biggest slot-machine win in US history. Instead she was offered $2.25 and a steak dinner. She declined.